Dr Nick Gearing

Thank you to Matt Bridge & Steve Barrett for their guidance and helping me take this from a seed of an idea to an 11 academy study, and of course all the participating clubs. As we tried to bridge the gap between football and science, the openness is really appreciated.

5/5

🧠 Mixed training formats dominate, but balance between opposed and unopposed practices varies by age and club.

Parts of this study were presented at the World Congress of Science & Soccer 2025, but this an expanded paper

4/5

🇧🇪 Belgian academies had highest tech actions, Norwegian and English academies ranked lowest across key metrics like touches and releases.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿Eng Category 2 and 3 academies recorded more technical actions per session than Category 1, likely due to condensed weekly schedules

3/5

✅ First cross-Euro study, over 33,000 training session data points using Playermaker across 11 academies in 5 countries

⚽ Unopposed = higher technical outputs: players had significantly more touches and ball releases per minute in unopposed vs opposed sessions

2/5

Delighted to have another of my PhD papers published: ‘A preliminary multi-club project: Understanding player technical outcomes in European football academies training sessions’.

For full access to the paper, see the link below:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

A breakdown below👇🏻
1/5

Thank you to Matt Bridge & Steve Barrett for their guidance and helping me take this from a seed of an idea to an 11 academy study, and of course all the participating clubs. As we tried to bridge the gap between football and science, the openness is really appreciated.

5/5

🧠 Mixed training formats dominate, but balance between opposed and unopposed practices varies by age and club.

Parts of this study were presented at the World Congress of Science & Soccer 2025, but this an expanded paper

4/5

🇧🇪 Belgian academies had highest tech actions, Norwegian and English academies ranked lowest across key metrics like touches and releases.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿Eng Category 2 and 3 academies recorded more technical actions per session than Category 1, likely due to condensed weekly schedules

3/5

✅ First cross-Euro study, over 33,000 training session data points using Playermaker across 11 academies in 5 countries

⚽ Unopposed = higher technical outputs: players had significantly more touches and ball releases per minute in unopposed vs opposed sessions

2/5

- 4v4 format significantly increased total no. actions per player per minute compared to the 7v7
- Both D and N-D players increased their no. of actions during the 4v4 compared to 7v7 match format
- Huge % increase in number of actions for the N-D (143%) + D players (72%) in 4v4

There was also an excellent study by Hintermann et al (2021) comparing 4v4 and 7v7.

- Based on the number of technical and tactical actions in the 7v7 matches, players were classified as dominant (D) or non-dominant (N-D)

Some interesting findings from that study below…

Huge benefits have been found in playing 3v3 games

This links to a lot of how teams have been training in the top European Academies, as highlighted in my PhD work

Interesting new format changes to youth football in England

⁃3v3 at U7
⁃5v5 at U8 & U9
⁃7v7 at U10 & U11
⁃9v9 at U12 & U13

5v5 Futsal to be played throughout U8+

🧵

Thank you Michelle 🙌🏻

PhDone.

Yesterday I passed my viva for my Professional Doctorate (PhD) with the University of Birmingham!

The past 4 1/2 years have been a real learning curve for not only creating research in the most successful European football academies, but also my professional skills to take into my job.

AFC Bournemouth football club released powerful women's safety video about walking home in the dark after a football match - brilliant!

wp.me/p4BB8h-1rui

My PhD has so far been all about bridging this gap between football and research, if that’s something that you want to do too then let’s chat and see if we can improve both of these worlds.

So here’s my proposal… let’s focus on what works, rather than wasting energy to prove what doesn’t work. Let’s use our time to publish papers/create sessions of the best techniques rather than trying to discredit someone that works in the game/in a university and vice-versa.

The only way to do this is to monitor every child in the world from touching a ball when 2 years old, through to U18. Intervention studies never know if a child is dribbling the ball home from practice in a play/IP context, or passing with friends. It’s all learning and you simply cannot measure it…

I want to point out one more thing when it comes to the testing and academic reporting- nobody has ever and can ever prove that small sided game or isolated practice on their own will be the answer. How could you possibly test it, and how do we know that our experiments are truly controlled?

Some coaches in top academies said they would never used IP, but said how they have a midfielder practice long range passes to a winger… It seems that isolated practice has become a ‘dirty phrase’ that some coaches do not want to be associated with due to the perception received on academic twitter.

SSGs; these are split into 2 categories

- 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 (and variations of e.g. 3v2)

- 4v4+

Here is a great SSG I’ve picked up along the way which is now used in Germany as part of their new SSG curriculum👇🏻

There’s many ways to deliver this. The idea is that (for example) strikers can practice shooting in the same varied way that they do in a game situation, it will never be the same twice but the practice is in the adaption with a high number of repetitions which can’t be achieved by just playing SSGs

Fabian Otte has done some fantastic research in this area around the idea of ‘Repetition without repetition’. Honestly, take a look, it’s brilliant and uses context to create the situation again and again but without the stationary ball and queues of players. 👇🏻

So it turns out that clubs have 3 ways to do IP:

Ball mastery: ball each with interference. Non-linear, FUN games

Extras: practicing specific skills or techniques

Coaches: specialised people to take small groups

One word cropped up a lot in this… CONTEXT

The academic world use Pill (2013) definition of isolated practice, assuming everything is linear/‘drill-based’ with a ball and dribbling around (or standing next to) cones, etc etc. but you know what happens when you ASSuME…

One question from outside of football academies is ‘what do the sessions look like?’, well these interviews had same great insights, and one of them was exactly that. On the left is the usual session structure, on the right are the extras that happen not in a team setting.

So I interviewed coaches that have worked with some of the best players in the world (while they were young academy players) what the sessions looked like, small sided games? Isolated practice? Both? None? And here’s the results 👇🏻